Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,150

could also just grab my reins, force me to hurt and kill like she almost did in the Black Archives.

“Zera, no,” Lucien starts. “What if—”

“I won’t,” I say. “Trust me. Please.”

He hedges, black eyes sliced thin. “I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.” I say it, and unsay it. “It’ll be only for a second. Please.”

I feel the grip of his magic loosen before his expression does. “Only a second.”

I suppress my smile and dive straight into the silence. Of the silence. One foot in front of the other, one step deeper at a time. Falling, like falling into a weightless ocean. I’ve seen the ocean now.

What a beautiful unlife it’s been.

I surface into absolute stillness, into the world being split six ways, six eyes looking at six Luciens. Magma-hot blood tears streak down my face, eye-corner to eye-corner, the blood dripping to the floor and mixing with the pearl blood of the Tree of Souls. The hunger in my head is gone, gnawing at me no longer, but I understand it better now. It’s not really gone. Weeping doesn’t get rid of the hunger. It just lets it rest—from the pain. From the anger. From the guilt.

Weeping isn’t to suppress the hunger. It’s to embrace it.

To embrace all of myself, no matter how dark or terrifying.

I’m here.

I’m here, I think loudly and clearly. Come and get me.

I look at the First Root sticking out of the dirt, crystallize its sundered shape in my mind. The connection between Bone Tree Varia and the valkerax part of me twinges, a harp string plucked too fast and too hard. She’s seen it. She knows I’m looking at the First Root. So close to splitting it again. Too close.

The impact is instantaneous. I hear Malachite shouting outside, Fione wailing, the hiss of steam as Yorl’s matronic moves, the battle raging outside as my unheart splinters into a thousand shards. Lucien’s face looks ashen and fearful—scared of losing everyone. Of losing me.

But we can’t move. We can’t go out and help them. We have to be here, at the First Root, to fix it all. To end—and begin—it all.

I have to trust that they’re still alive. I can’t let the emotion of fear submerge me. Drown me. The ocean is so big, so full of life, but I won’t drown in it. I can swim. I’ve learned to swim now. Reginall taught me. Ev taught me. The fourteen men I killed taught me. Lucien taught me.

Everyone in my life taught me to swim in the ocean of myself.

I can swim now, and there’s an island I have to reach—that black-rock island of Rel’donas, that small, peaceful room where I found rest at last.

Fire starts to lick at the cave’s mouth, and the ground rocks us to our knees as two valkerax entwined in furious combat writhe over each other just outside, slamming into the cave and away from it, blood spattering over earth and our clothes and staining the First Root. Dirt and dust fall from the precarious ceiling, white feathers and fur flying.

Ev.

Ev, tearing into the stomach of its brethren, as its stomach is torn into, too.

And then Varia.

She appears out of nowhere—teleporting? I don’t know, but she feels like she’s gone, far away, and then she’s in front of us, sallow and hungry and mere rags, a skeleton of the princess I knew and the sister Lucien loves. It’s clear to read on his face—he doesn’t move. He can’t. She looks like a corpse. Dead. Worse—sucked clean of all life. The bone choker around her neck is nearly decapitating her now, the red flesh of her windpipe showing, the white tendons of her throat column exposed. She looks a waif, but the power around her is harder and heavier than lead.

And her milky, shriveled eyes are on me.

In a way, Lucien’s shock, that one moment of hesitation—his love for his sister sealed the world’s fate. He could’ve gone for the First Root the moment she appeared. But his love roots him to the spot for just this one second. And I take it.

He has never starved. But he has loved.

And that’s why, at the end of the world, there are wolves and not mortals.

That’s why I reach the Root first. That’s why Varia lunges for me, my hands gripping the slippery pearlescent blood as I try desperately to push the two halves of the First Root together again. To hold it there, to heal it there. She’s only destruction. She doesn’t know—she can’t know